High value mobile assets such as locomotives, aircrafts, mass transit systems, mining equipment, transportable medical equipment, and marine vessels typically employ onboard event/data recorder “black box” systems. These event/data recorders log a variety of system parameters used for incident investigation, crew performance evaluation, fuel efficiency analysis, maintenance planning, and predictive diagnostics. Recorded data may include such parameters as speed, distance traveled, location, fuel level, engine revolution per minute (RPM), fluid levels, operator controls, pressures, and ambient conditions. In addition to the basic event and operational data, video and audio event/data recording capabilities are also deployed on many of these same mobile assets.
The prevalence of mobile-asset recording, logging, and diagnosing systems has created an environment where an end user may often find multiple event/data recorder manufacturers as well as models across a fleet of mobile assets. In fact, many mobile assets combine one original equipment manufacturer's (OEM's) engine diagnostics with another manufacturer's event/data recorder, another vendor's fuel level monitoring, and yet another manufacturer's video and audio recorder. In such a situation, each of these disparate systems requires use of different data access, data download and data analysis tools (typically PC-based software) to locally download and view data, where such tools are often incompatible with each other. After such data is retrieved, the time offset of each device must be determined for manual data synchronization. As one would appreciate, the task of managing the different data access, data download and data analysis tools, custody and analysis of downloaded data, and archival of the downloaded data from a fleet of thousands of mobile assets is extremely cumbersome.
Moreover, managing the one or more of the data access, data download and data analysis processes using wireless tools further increases complexity of such system because each OEM and event/data recorder supplier may have its own wireless implementation that may require separate wireless hardware both onboard the mobile asset and at fixed stations wirelessly linked to onboard systems.